Primalcraft: Switching from Eclipse to IntelliJ IDEA

I haven’t been entirely idle during the past month or so. From day one, I’ve been coding Primalcraft using Eclipse as my IDE (integrated development environment). The main reason is that every single tutorial I found used Eclipse. As a novice, I decided to use what all the tutorials were using. It was much easier to get off the ground that way.

But I’ve heard some pretty good things about IntelliJ on the Minecraft Forge forums. While Eclipse is a very mature and ubiquitous product, IntelliJ is newer and sports some pretty fancy features. After toying with the idea for months, I finally decided to take the plunge and switch from Eclipse to IntelliJ.

I used this tutorial by diesieben. The switch was pretty easy.

Once I got started, I found that IntelliJ was automatically checking for a whole host of potential problems that Eclipse wasn’t. Virtually every file in my project had some kind of warning. So I started working methodically through them, chipping away bit by bit. It took me several weeks to fix all the issues IntelliJ found.

Thanks to IntelliJ, I now feel like my mod is much more solid than it was before. Although I miss a few things about Eclipse, overall I’m pretty happy with IntelliJ. It seems much smarter, the interface is more modern, and it’s just more pleasant to work with.